


It Takes A Village And A City

by tielan



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama, Gen, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2011-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-28 06:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teyla learns to paint. John learns not to be jealous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Takes A Village And A City

**Author's Note:**

> For foxyinthecity in the Teylafen Teyla Thing-A-Thon. She wanted gen or John/Teyla, with 'duty, denied passions, bad ass Teyla'. I think this counts as 'bad ass Teyla', and may very well count as 'duty' too!

Torren discovered the joy of paint shortly after he reached his second year.

There were no guesses for the culprit when the weekly science-fiction viewing club in the city discovered their 52-inch 3D-capable brand new TV screen carefully shipped over from Earth gaily smeared with titanium white, ochre yellow, and cerulean blue - those being the colours of the paint tubes that Torren had managed to unscrew the lids.

Fortunately, it was only acrylic paint and washed off easily enough. Well, for a given value of 'easily'.

Evan apologised to Teyla about the colours upon his return from an off-world mission.

"Sorry. The call came and I forgot to pack up after - I must have left the cupboard door just a little bit open..."

"Yes, well," Teyla glanced back at the bathroom, where the squealing sounds of happy splashing were taking place. "I believe that it is the science-fiction viewing club that are more likely to require grovelling."

She had already done her own share of grovelling that afternoon - to say nothing of cleaning up after her son's artistry while the science-fiction club watched.

He winced. "Yeah, uh, I was trying to put that off."

"I believe it would be best to get it over with," Teyla said wryly.

"Do you..." Evan looked like he was steeling himself to make the offer. "Do you want help getting Torren clean?"

"No, John is doing an adequate job." She saw his eyes widen slightly and lifted an eyebrow at him.

"Uh, right. Well, I'm sorry about the paint. I'll be more careful next time."

"Actually, I have a favour to ask of you."

"Yeah? Sure."

"For a while, I have wished to learn how to paint. I would like you to teach me - if you are willing and whenever you have time, that is."

"Well, um, yeah. I mean, you don't really have to learn, because there's all kinds of styles..." Evan stopped himself mid-stream. "Sure. I can do that."

"Consider it repayment for leaving the paints for Torren to find."

He grinned, somewhat ruefully, then glanced behind her and pokered up. "Sir."

"Lorne." John sounded unimpressed by Lorne's appearance, although he refrained from asking any questions. "Teyla, I'm getting a new towel because I can't find the one he used yesterday."

"I put it in the laundry," she told him, smiling. His shirt was clearly damp, and his trousers had not escaped unscathed either. "Get a new one."

John was retrieving a towel when a damp little body came barrelling out of the bedroom.

"Mama!"

"Torren," she began, frowning and saw him check as he heard her tone of voice.

"Oh, no you don't, buddy!" John swept Torren up in a towel and the air filled with shrieks and giggles before the inner door closed behind them. "Come on, let's get you dry..."

Teyla turned back to find Evan looking slightly bemused. "He is good with Torren," was all the explanation she gave.

"Yeah, I can see that." Evan ran a hand through his hair, clearly thought about saying something, then just as clearly decided it was none of his business. "So, we'll talk later and I'll arrange some time to get you started painting."

"That would be lovely, Evan. Thank you."

\--

As Evan taught her to paint, Teyla found a certain pleasure in the mindlessness of it - from eye to mind to hand to canvas.

"You have your golf," she told John one evening when he studied her latest attempt at the sunset over the city. It was not good, but it was not bad. "This is my recreational activity."

"I thought that was meditation. Or bantos."

"Meditation requires stillness and silence and peace. Of which there is not very much in the city. And bantos is your recreational activity, too."

He put the painting back on the easel and rested his hands on his hips. "Getting beaten up is a recreational activity?"

Teyla just gave him a look, silently reminding him how they had ended up the last time she had beat him at bantos. After a moment, John coughed, his neck red. "Okay, maybe it is. So how long are you going to continue these lessons with Lorne?"

"Until you stop being jealous?" Teyla smiled as she crossed the room to study her work. She felt she had the atmosphere and the light right, even if she would have liked a little more depth in the shadows. She must ask Evan how it was done the next time she spoke with him.

John slid a too-casual arm over her shoulder. "What makes you think I'm jealous?"

One eyebrow arched up at him. "You are answering a question with a question."

"Wait, that makes you think--? Mmphmm..."

Teyla enjoyed the way John melted against her when she kissed him hard - like all his bones had turned rubbery and he wasn't sure if he could stand.

"So," he said when they came up for air, "no thinking for a while?"

Torren was back on New Athos with Kanaan, right now, and so they could have the suite of rooms all to themselves once John locked the door with his gene...

"No thinking," Teyla agreed and led him to the bed.

\--

The Athosians painted for function rather than pleasure, and their depictions were usually symbolic rather than representative.

"I do not see the point of it," Kanaan confessed one afternoon, holding Torren upside down while their son squealed in delight and flailed his arms around. "It is pretty but not practical..."

"And therefore very Lantean," Teyla finished when he trailed off. She finished the blue curve of the river that gushed far below them on the ledge, and looked up as Kanaan righted Torren in his arms. The slightly abashed look on his face said he had been thinking such thoughts, even if he did not say it. "But it is...enjoyable."

He sighed, but smiled as he did so. "Our Teyla. Always a new horizon, always something else."

"You knew what I was from the start, Kanaan."

"Yes, I did," he agreed, and tickled Torren about the ribs. Things had been easier once he had accepted that she would never come back to live among their people again.

"Papa, stop!" Torren squealed, writhing happily on the grass. "Stop!"

Teyla paused in her painting laughed to watch them - man and boy playing, without a care in the world. She had been doubtful when Kanaan had expressed a desire to come with her - she could paint, he said, and he would watch Torren. So far, however, it had worked well.

She kept painting, the canvas propped up on the easel as she worked as fast as she could. No oil paints - not when Torren was around; he had learned not to touch, but still, Teyla felt better knowing he was not in danger of poisoning himself, however accidentally.

The hills just so - the trees...difficult to reproduce in detail.

"I think that Torren and I will go for a walk now," Kanaan said when he was done tickling. "Perhaps we can find some berries to add to lunch?"

"Berries!" Torran leaped to his feet, hair askew, his shirt-strings coming undone. "Mama come too?"

"Mama will be waiting here for your berries," Teyla said, putting her brush down and kneeling to tie Torren's shirt-strings closed. "And then we will have lunch."

She paused as she glanced up at Kanaan who was looking back along the track where they had come.

"Teyla?"

Three men were coming down the path, roughly dressed and in no Athosian garb. Their faces were clean shaven, but their eyes were cold, and Teyla's blood chilled as she looked at them and groped for a weapon she had not brought, not thinking it needful.

Stupid and foolish and short-sighted! New Athos had been taken by surprise once before, why had she thought that it was safe to go without a weapon?

"Keep Torren behind us," she said in low towns. "And if you see me take one down, then take Torren and the radio and run for the camp. Will you do that?"

"Yes."

Teyla went forward to greet them, as a trader would - one who had nothing to fear. "Hello there! I am Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tagan. You are welcome to Athos."

The one in the lead smiled. It might have been mistaken for a nice smile, but Teyla could see the calculating edges in it. "Then we don't need to look further. Take 'em!"

As the two behind the leader broke off, heading for Torren and Kanaan, Teyla struck, low and hard. She had taken the leader's measure as she walked up to him. His boots had seemed too solid to be stomped on, so she kicked his knee instead.

The crack of bone was not always a nice sound, but Teyla took great satisfaction in it this time. His screech of pain scattered through the trees, and she heard Torren's wail of 'Mama!' rise up behind her in plaintive harmony. She followed the kick up with a punch in his throat and did not care that he gasped and wheezed and flailed at her jab.

She turned to look. Kanaan was halfway up the slope, still trying to get away, but when Teyla had told him to run she had reckoned without her son. Torren - stubborn as always, was refusing to leave without her. Even the prospect of bad men capturing him was no deterrent to his determination to stay and fight.

The hunters were nearly upon them.

She needed a weapon with which to fight. The leader's long-bladed knife was still in his belt, and she ripped it free. It was not well-made, but it was well enough. Teyla turned, judged the distance as she looked, and threw it at the one struggling with Torren

It fell short of his back, but cut his thigh in the process and he yelped and slowed to a limp, calling to his companion to keep after the kid.

Cold rage welled up within Teyla's breast.

They would not take her son.

Teyla did not remember yanking at the easel, ripping off the flimsily-hinged supporting leg at the back. She did not recall breaking it over her knee.

Teyla did recall starting up the slope after the two hunters, Kanaan, and her son. She recalled smashing the limping one in the back of his head. Perhaps it broke his neck, for he went down as she passed him and she gave him no more thought.

Her eyes were focused on the last hunter - the one who was dragging her screaming son away down one of the paths through the forest - the one that led to the Stargate. Kanaan sprawled in the dirt, his expression dazed. "Go...after," he said, and she needed no further encouragement.

He had done something to Torren by the time she caught up, for her son lay limp over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. And he could run, but Teyla was unburdened with a boy and fuelled by anger.

She hit out at his knee as she drew along side him, timing her arrival to coincide with a soft, muddy dip in the earth. He tripped, stumbled, and stretched his length in the mud, and Torren flopped off his shoulders.

Teyla dumped one of her sticks and grabbed the front of his jerkin with her free hand. She yanked him away from Torren and then grunted as his fist landed in her belly.

Falling back, she circled around, crouching to pick up the stick, more by touch than by sight. "Who sent you to get my son?"

A sneer twisted his features and he pulled out his knife. "You think we're stupid? That we'd just up and tell our contract?"

"You were foolish to come here and think you could steal my son." Teyla said, moving in. "That I would let you."

She had fought Wraith Queens to keep her son while he grew beneath her heart. She had killed Michael to protect Torren while he was still a babe. She had spoken and argued and endured much dismissal on Earth in the hope that Atlantis' returned presence in Pegasus might mean Torren had the hope of a Wraith-free future.

No-one would take Torren from her so long as she had breath.

She deflected his lunge and the swipe of his knife with her left, and smacked his knee with her right. "Tell me," she said, "and I will let you leave this planet alive."

"You don't scare me," he growled and lunged again. This time, she twisted past him and slapped him in the small of his back.

He turned, but fear wavered in his eyes.

"And yet you claim you are not stupid?" Teyla's eyes narrowed. If he had a contract on her son, then he was bound to silence and nothing short of torture would get him to speak. And Teyla had neither the stomach nor the desire for torture.

She did not bother to ask him anything further. Instead she attacked, battering him from the right and the left, slapping him high and smiting him low. He defended well enough, but he was no match for a mother's fury. And when his knife stuck in the easel leg, she twisted the leg and the knife from his hand, and laid him out with a hard thwack across the side of his head.

She bound his hands behind his back using his belt, and crossed over to Torren, picking him up and checking him anxiously for injury or poison.

He was breathing, but unresponsive, and when she lifted his eyelids to check, his pupils were huge black dots in his iris that did not change with the light.

"Teyla?" Kanaan came through the woods, stumbling a little, but with relief written all over his face. "Teyla! What is...? Is he...?"

"Unconscious only. But I think he has been drugged. We must get him back to Atlantis as soon as possible."

"Yes." He nodded and only glanced at . "The other two - one is dead, and the other is breathing, but I have bound him up. I called the camp on the radio-- They're coming--"

Kanaan seemed to run out of words, and Teyla let him cling to her for a moment, shared strength. Then he swallowed and stepped back, holding her at arm's length. "You're tired, Teyla. You've done enough. Let me carry him back."

She let him carry Torren back, and saw the grim determination in his face, as well as the tenderness of fatherhood.

They stepped around the broken and well-used easel leg as they left.

\--

When the door to her bathroom opened, Teyla did not open her eyes beneath the hot shower spray.

"Hey, Teyla, this is a sauna..." John began. He trailed off.

A moment later, the shower stall opened and he stepped in, naked. She went to his arms with a sense of relief. Among the Athosians - even Kanaan - she had to be strong - as he had to be strong for the Lanteans as their leader and military commander. But here, in the privacy of each other, she could let go of that burden for a little while.

"Keller said he's gonna be okay."

"I know," she said, resting her cheek against his shoulder. "But I am...worried."

"We'll find out who wants him, okay? Ronon's already making lists of people he can threaten for information."

That made her laugh - as he had doubtless intended it to. And it warmed her. _We will find out..._ And he meant himself, and Ronon, and Rodney and many other people in the city. Just as Kanaan had said to her in the infirmary earlier, _People gossip. We will find out who it is who has taken out this contract on our son._

 _And we will make him pay._

The words had not been said, but Teyla heard them no less. She heard it now in John's reassurances.

Her son, and the two worlds who loved him and to which he belonged in equal share.

John ducked his head a little. "You okay?"

Teyla lifted her head and kissed him, deep and tender and glad. "I will be."


End file.
